


Sacrament

by Hannigrammatic



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-08 23:44:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6880420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannigrammatic/pseuds/Hannigrammatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham, consultant for the FBI, leaves the most recent crime scene feeling decidedly off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sacrament

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this is just a practice thing I guess. I don't know -- I'm in a really weird mood tonight and this just happened. Feel free to ignore ♥ There's sort of a meaning to it, I suppose.
> 
> Not beta read. <3

1.

Black lines, sure and even, spread out in an intricate, circular pattern -no, not a pattern: a design. Deliberate. Forensics says it’s made with ashes, the kind left over by a particular type of wood that still needs to be determined.

Will Graham doesn’t really care about that (not yet, anyway, later it’s going to matter a whole hell of a lot). He’s more concerned with the body lying in the middle of the circular ‘whatever the fuck it is’, as supplied helpfully by Jack Crawford, his burly no-nonsense boss. She’s young, bordering on adulthood, with long flaxen hair spread like a halo around her head. Her eyes are shut, and she honestly appears to be sleeping, not dead and gone with her soul fled from this plane of existence. 

Naked and pale, she’s unscathed besides the hole in her chest where her heart used to nestle and beat blood and oxygen into her body. Honestly if it weren’t for the sickly-sweet stench causing Will’s tongue to swell with the urge to vomit, he could imagine that she hadn’t even started to decompose. There’s a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and a birthmark on her neck, and her nose is a little too small for her face but it upturns at the tip, and she’s just so beautiful and young. Will’s heart skips two entire beats, and disgust and sadness lingers in those spaces with a heat that would flay him alive if he let it. The phrase ‘too young to die’ has never resonated within him as strong as it does now.

“What’s that in her hand?” Beverly Katz asks.

She’s a hard one to read. Will thinks she’s struggling not to liken the young girl to her niece, who is approaching the same age. He reaches for her with his mind, the only prized possession he has, and feels a shroud of anger around the tiniest shred of sadness. For a life snuffed out? He doesn’t prod any deeper because he needs to focus on the here and now.

“Rose petals,” Jimmy Price says grimly, and Will quirks a brow, watching the man pry the delicate, crushed petals from the death-strong grip of the girl. “A whole lot of them. They’re wrapped around something; one second.”

Jimmy’s face pales slightly. 

“What is it?” Will demands.

“Blood. And uh- a foetus, it looks like.”

“Human?” Jack Crawford has approached silent as a shadow.

“No.”

“What, then?”

A dove, Will already knows. Somehow. The answer comes from the air around him and fills his brain with a flutter of wings and a mournful cry. He shuts his eyes and pictures the bird soaring through silence, and the night is young and full of so many possibilities. When he opens them, Will can see confusion writ plainly on everyone’s faces.

“I’m assuming this is some sort of joke,” Jack gruffly says. “Some bullshit ritual stuff to make the authorities scratch their heads like monkeys.”

“The most likely assumption,” Beverly agrees. “And honestly it’s working.”

“Not to mention it’s creepy as all hell,” Jimmy smirks and returns to his job, bagging the bloodied petals and the bird foetus.

Definitely creepy. But Will knows it’s not a joke. 

He meets Jack’s eyes and nods imperceptibly. A hush falls over the crime scene, and all eyes turn to Will. _Stop looking at me_ , he thinks. When they finally do, and when they walk away as one, Will is already tuning it all out, eyes shut once more and mind opening to the invisible forces around him. It doesn’t take him long to find the mind of the killer.

2.

_I lay her body in the middle of the circle and arrange her limbs as if she is sleeping: her mind has already dreamt its last dream, many hours ago when she lay down in her own bed between downy sheets and set her head on her plush pillows. I’ve taken more time preparing the sigil than I have her, but now I will pay the proper dues._

_I cut open her chest, straddling her body to keep her in place when she thrashes awake. She tries to scream but her throat is too dry, and she sounds like the squawking mother dove that cried when I took her eggs. The knife sinks deeper and the blood flowing between us soaks our flesh and the dirt beneath us. When she dies, my hand is reaching into her and tearing out her still-beating heart, bone wrenched aside mindlessly._

_All that matters is this. The organ is heavy and warm in my hands. I hold it up into the moonlight painting the world softly and gently pale._

_This is my design_.

3.

“It’s a sacrifice of some sort,” Will says before Jack can ask.

The taller man had wandered over at the first signs of movement from his prized _almost_ -agent. Will comes back to himself with a rush and a pounding migraine that leaves him shaking.

“That much is pretty obvious,” Jack grouses. “You have anything else for me, Will?”

“The killer had to do it. He was driven to it. I don’t know why. I just know that this girl’s death only mattered because it provided what he needed -a beating heart.”

“Is that all?”

Wind stirs the dead leaves and debris in the empty park. Will glances around, taking in the harsh black lines in the dirt and the body of a fair-haired girl whose friends and family would mourn for once they identified her. The heart is gone, taken, but not by the killer. There’s something wrong here, and Will feels it like he feels everything -strongly, truthfully, and without any explanation.

4.

It’s quarter to midnight when they leave the crime scene. Will swallows a handful of painkillers, pockets the bottle in his jacket, and then sighs long and loud.

Tonight is one that’s going to stick, and it’s going to do so for quite a long while. He doesn’t have to observe the way his body still reacts to the grisly scene that had seconds ago been spread out at his feet -it’s still ripe and fresh and tingling in his veins. He can’t wait to get home and down a few fingers of whisky, to sit on the porch and watch his pack of strays yip and bark and roll around in the dirt. Normalcy is where it’s at, Will knows.

5.

Only, there’s nothing normal about the rest of that night, or the day after, or the week after. Instead, there’s a niggling spark of _something_ burrowing its way deep inside of him, sneaking around his bones and organs until it can nestle safely within his guts. It’s not just an idea or a feeling or anything intangible -it’s _real_.

Will first notices it in his reflection three days later when he’s brushing his teeth. One of his eyes is slightly lighter than the other, not just in hue because there’s a strange luminosity about it that is reminiscent to those of an animal’s at night when struck by a beam of light. The second he focuses on the visual discrepancy, however, it’s gone. He forgets it, blames it on his tired mind. A week after that, he _**hears**_ it.

I don’t want to be here, it -says? Will isn’t certain what word could possibly describe it since there’s no voice to speak of, much less a person that it could belong to.

“Where?” he answers in the silence of his house.

Perked ears and tilted heads meet his words, and Will barely has the time to calm his pack when he gets his answer.

In you, it projects.

A better word, Will surmises. He shuts his eyes and pretends he’s not insane.

“Why are you in me, then?” he asks, quieter.

You were open, it answers.

“I don’t understand.”

Will thinks he’s perhaps had enough to drink, and that he should turn the lamp off and try to sleep. Maybe take a few more advil to cushion the restless night he could feel like a weight across his chest.

Come with me, it whispers into his ear. Just for a little while.

On the verge of waking and sleeping, Will acquiesces.

6.

Waves crash against the tall cliffs that surround the pristine, enormous palace. Red-roofed, smooth surfaces, shiny stained-glass windows. Towers taller than he can see, a gilded parapeted walkway connecting them. The door to the palace is wide and huge and red like blood, and it opens onto a foyer awash with colors and designs.

In the middle there is a skeleton beseeching him. 

Come, a voice commands him forward, and he follows.

Into the palace, down hallways stretching endlessly, passed doors locked or open or destroyed entirely. Into an empty room with a dias raised out of the floor, glittering in the firelight from thousands and thousands of candles on the floor and hanging from the ceiling.

Closer, the voice sighs.

Red eyes greet him, and that’s when Will wakes up in a tangle of soaked sheets. His hair is plastered to his forehead, and his heart is pattering along at a harsh pace. When he catches his breath, he gets up and has a scalding hot shower, and then he dresses for the day since it’s nearly six AM.

He drives to Quantico to teach, and afterwards Jack pulls him aside to tell him about a man named Hannibal Lecter.

“I don’t need a psychiatrist,” Will hisses immediately. 

“I know, Will,” large hands are held up in a gesture of surrender. “But he’s been recommended to me. If you could just talk to him.”

“Why? Why should I talk to him, Jack?”

Dark eyes assess him, and then Jack clears his throat; “You’ve been acting strange, Will.”

Will raises a brow. 

“Just talk to him. I can’t sleep at night knowing I broke you.”

Jack walks away before he can open his mouth, and Will leaves the classroom to lock himself in a stall in the public bathroom. He sits on the toilet seat and stares at the inside of the stall as his mind circles around Jack’s words. Strange -- Will generally acts strange by default, but more than that it’s the tone in Jack’s voice that leaves him jarred. Fear and disgust, directed blindly, which is something that Jack never does. He’s a man who is too discerning to do anything blindly.

So Will agrees to go so that the world can become balanced once more, and to make Jack feel better about himself.

7.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter has a lavish office, and an even more lavish outfit. His features are chiseled, elegant as the paisley tie bright at his neck. They sit across from each other and Will doesn’t meet the man’s eyes.

“Not fond of eye-contact,” the man observes.

“It’s not required to talk,” Will supplies, even though the words had not been phrased as a question. 

He allows his gaze to settle on a pale eyebrow, and then a pronounced cheekbone. Full lips, a subtle chin but a strong jawline. The suit Hannibal wears costs more than Will’s seen in cash, at least in his own hands. 

“A truth,” Hannibal’s accented voice says. “However, another truth is that we are indeed here to talk. So --talk.”

Will imagines the man spreading his arms wide as he says the last word. It’s enough to make him meet Hannibal’s eyes finally, and that’s when he feels the _something_ in his guts stir crazily. His stomach gurgles in complaint, and the room begins to spin as sweat beads his brows and then drips off of his forehead and nose. Distantly, Hannibal questions him, asks him if he’s okay.

Let me out, it screams. Let me out let me out let me out.

“THEN LEAVE,” Will jumps to his feet and yells the words so loud that they echo in the office. 

Hannibal is on his feet immediately, but not to help. His eyes are gleaming, head tilted downwards until his face is covered in shadows. _Those eyes_ , Will thinks.

“I know you,” he speaks aloud.

“You do now,” Hannibal’s voice has deepened impossibly.

His eyes have no pupils, no irises, they are merely red, the shade of blood and death. From his hair sprouts two sharp horns, and from his darkened mouth fangs dip passed lips pulling back into a grin.

“Welcome home,” Hannibal and the _thing_ say together.

Will collapses.

8.

“What are you?” are the first words to leave Will’s mouth when he wakes up on Hannibal’s cold office floor.

“I beg your pardon?” Hannibal is helping him to stand, hair slightly ruffled out of its tidy place, a frown on his regal face.

“What happened to your eyes? Where are the horns?”

Will blindly reaches out and pats his hands along smooth and dry skin, presses into bone that is human alone. His fingers search through soft hair and find only scalp, cleaned and smelling faintly of flowers.

“Will, you’ve had an episode.”

Strong hands capture his own and push him gently away once the man is certain Will can stand on his own. The office smells of sweat and despair, now that Will has doused the place in it, and if there is any regret, it’s drowned by the silence Will can hear and feel and taste from the very center of his being.

“It’s gone,” Will whispers. 

He leaves the office just to make sure. Drives home to be certain. Lays in bed and closes his eyes and knows that it’s true. His stomach feels strangely empty without the presence that had curled up there.

9.

It’s too empty.

10.

Will dreams about the palace again. He stands in the foyer and looks up at the figure descending a wide staircase. Red eyes and shiny, sharp-tipped horns. Clawed fingers at the end of arms spread wide in true welcome.

Hannibal embraces him tightly and never lets go, and Will finally feels safe.

The next day, Will drives to Hannibal’s office and apologizes for his behavior. He agrees to start seeing him regularly, and immediately. Over time, Will notices a strange, soft light in the man’s gaze, his brown eyes not red after all, though they appeared to be in certain angles of light.

**Author's Note:**

> Mood music: Motel 6 by Jean Deaux


End file.
